


Through Snow

by peonylanterns



Series: Timeskips [1]
Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Canon Divergence, Eventual Smut, F/M, Female Reader, Gore, Short Chapters, Slow Burn, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-12
Updated: 2016-08-09
Packaged: 2018-07-14 13:49:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7174313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peonylanterns/pseuds/peonylanterns
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time he watches you die, he regards you only with a mixture of revulsion and detached fascination. But death by death, timeline by timeline, his interest in you begins to grow.</p><p>Critique heavily encouraged.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Timeline 1a

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first time writing something with a clear plotline, so the writing's clunkier than I'd like. Advice and critique are appreciated.

[Timeline 1a]

Snow is falling in soft clumps from the cavern ceiling, so thick and fast that it’s already starting to cover up the splattered red spray around you. But your blood is still warm enough to melt the falling flakes, and the stain of it is still spreading itself along the ground. 

With some effort, you manage to roll onto your side, curling into a fetal position and clutching at the open gash across your belly, trying vainly to keep your internal organs from becoming external ones instead. 

Your breath comes out as white steam in this frozen air, yet your skin is streaked with sweat - even in this cold, the hot throb of pain that cuts through your torso is like fire shooting through your nervous system. By now though, the snow has taken the edge off, smothering the heat and dampening it with hypothermic numbness.

Earlier, you’d tried screaming for help. It had been an exercise in futility: the empty landscape had thoroughly swallowed up the sound, absorbing it like a cotton gag. You’d given up when your throat had gone hoarse, settling instead for crossing your fingers and hoping that Gyftrot had been telling the truth when they’d said they were going for help.

-

A distant blob of blue at the far side of the cliff. The distinct glow of a lit cigarette. You smell the smoke before you hear the crunch of approaching footsteps.

“shit, what a mess.”

You recognize the low drawl of Sans’ voice. After a few seconds, his house-slippers come into view.

“Hi,” you croak.

“hey,” he responds, kneeling down next to you, “gyftrot sent me. said something about an accident.”

“Great. Wonderful. That’s a total lie, but whatever. Can you fix this?” You gesture weakly towards your ripped stomach.

“roll over and we’ll see.”

With considerably less effort than it took to roll onto your side, you roll over onto your back and lie down with your arms at your sides, like you would for a doctor. Sans takes a long look at you, narrowing his eye sockets and taking a drag of his cigarette as he does. Then he sighs out a long stream of smoke that lingers in the air.

“nope. nothin’ I can do here.”

“Wait, what?” You grab at the hem of his jacket. “You - can’t you use magic or something?”

“sorry, kid. I’m no good with healing magic.”

Desperately, you yank at the cloth, trying to drag him closer. “Then go get someone who fucking can!”

He shrugs, “nearest person who can do anything for you’s all the way over in hotland. kinda far.”

_ What the fuck is Hotland?  _ you think to yourself furiously,  _ The opposite of Coldland? A country for volcanoes?  _

Lightheaded, dizzy from blood loss and panic, you cling tighter to his jacket, “Can’t you - can't you give me some of that weird monster food or something…?”

Sans raises his brow bone and scratches at the back of his skull. “huh. didn't think you'd know about that trick.” The glance he gives you is sympathetic, filled with detached pity. “but nah, that's not gonna help with something like this. all that stuff does for humans is give your natural healing factor a boost.”

“What the fuck? Did you come here just to watch me die?!”

“wasn't my original intention, but hey, you probably want someone to get your last words down, right?”

Fucking christ. You’re actually going to die. You're going to die in what's presumably “Coldland”, next to a skeleton who probably couldn't care less about what happens to you, because some vaguely reindeer-shaped monster attacked you when ran into them.

But it's a little better than last time, when you were murdered because you uprooted a carrot, by said carrot, with carrot-themed bullets. 

Is it murder though, if you didn't stay dead? You're still not entirely sure what happened back there. Did you really die? And are you going to stay dead this time, if this guy really is as useless as he seems?

It's not something you want to find out, but it doesn't look like you have much choice in the matter.

You feel like you should probably be angrier about what's happening right now, but the hypothermia and blood loss are both really beginning to take their toll. Getting mad takes effort, and effort is not something you’re all that willing to expend right now.

“any last requests?”

You stretch your hand out towards him, “Give me one of those cigarettes.”


	2. Timeline 1b

[Timeline 1b]

 

Sans slips another cigarette between his teeth and pulls out a beat-up looking lighter from his pocket. It takes him a couple of flicks to get a spark going, but once it’s there, he has to cup his hand around the flame to keep it from being snuffed out by the wind. Through the white haze of falling snow, you catch a glimpse of the fire’s dim glow from between his fingers, brightening the smoke with notes of red and orange.

When the cigarette’s lit, he puts it to your mouth. With fingers numb and clumsy from cold, you hold it steady and inhale slowly, letting the smoke flow into your lungs and out of your mouth again, where it’s blown away in grey wisps.

As you lay there, Sans sweeps his eyes across your ruined body, committing to memory the brightness of all that blood, the dull gleam of viscera behind ripped flesh. He regards you with a mixture of revulsion and detached fascination, as if you were some strange specimen spread across his workbench.  

If only the transition between life and death for humans were as clearcut as it is for monsters – but that’s the inconvenience of matter, isn’t it? When your physical form is governed solely by the movements of molecules, its unraveling becomes an incredibly messy affair.

He’s never seen death like this before. The few monsters he’s seen die had done so cleanly, melting away into a handful of dust. Quietly. Definitively. And here you are, interstitial fluid soaking into the snow, twitching and gasping and taking forever to die. He’s disgusted, but morbidly curious.

The self that he’d locked away so long ago surfaces again, urging him to probe deeper - look inside that shell and -

“Hey...can you take this?” You’re holding the bloodstained cigarette towards him with a shaky hand. “Don’t think I’m gonna finish it.”

He blinks, and it’s like he’s stepped out of a trance. Stubbing his own half-smoked cigarette out in the snow, he takes yours and slides it into his mouth. Oddly, its filter tastes metallic, with an undertone of salt and something else he can't quite place.

Then he realizes he's tasting human blood, and nearly spits it out - but catches himself. Instead, with a calmness he doesn't actually feel, he stubs this cigarette out too, saying, “i’m not much of a chain smoker.”

You give a feeble laugh that turns into a wheeze. “Me neither...finally managed to quit two years ago. For my health, y’know? But not much point in staying clean now.”  

“yeah. guess not.”

The tips of your outstretched fingers are tinged blue. Snow settles in your loose hair like white flowers, in your eyelashes like frost, as minutes pass in a silence that’s punctuated only by the sound of your breaths, growing slower and fewer with the cooling of your blood.

“It's less scary than I thought,” you say quietly, lips moving just enough to force the words out, “Last time I died, I didn't even have time to be afraid.”

Your eyes are looking towards him, but they have a faraway cast in them, as if you’re staring through him to something he can’t see. It unsettles him. Sans glances behind him, but there’s nothing except the dropoff and the dark woods underneath.

By the time he looks back at you, you’re no longer looking at anything at all.


	3. Timeline 1c

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter should be up soon.

[Timeline 1c]

 

Your soul slides out easily, like a key from a lock, floating out of your chest and into his outstretched hand. Like the others, it's saturated with color and lit with a faint luminescence - but there's something off about the way that it resonates in his grip.

Then again, he's only ever seen six of them. Pretty small sample size. It's entirely possible, he muses, that your soul is perfectly normal, and that all he's observing is a natural degree of variation.

So he shoves his concerns into the back of his mind, and instead allows his excitement to build in a way that it hasn’t since before the accident. 

The seventh soul, the last one needed to break the barrier, red as determination extract and glowing with possibility - everything might be reset, but as long as he can see the night sky for just an instant, feel the rays of the sun on his face for even a shimmering second, it’s enough. Because not once in any of these hundreds of resets, not  _ once _ has a human fallen here – god, it’s the last soul, and it’s  _ in his very hands – _

✧ 

\- he’s standing in front of Alphys’ tile puzzle, with Papyrus at his side. And across from them is you, looking so comically confused that he might’ve laughed if not for the sudden trepidation spreading through his bones.

“HEY! IT’S THE HUMAN!”

When you catch sight of them, you take an involuntary step backwards. You’re unsteady on your feet though, and you trip backwards into a snowbank.

“I’m - what? Wasn’t I already here? And wasn’t I -” You lift your shirt up to expose your torso, and stare at the smooth, unbroken flesh in disbelief, “I was all torn up - ”

His brother turns to him and says in an ineffectual whisper, “PSST. SANS. WHAT’S IT TALKING ABOUT?”

It looks like the timeline’s shifted backwards again. But that’s ok. Really. As long as it doesn’t reset, he’s willing to wait a little longer. After all, if you’re that determined to get out of here, you’ll run into Undyne sooner or later. And if that nasty little encounter with Gyftrot was any indication of your evasive skills, he can rest easy. 

Maybe it’s only coincidence that it glitched just then, maybe the anomaly purposefully timed it like that just to fuck with him, but - 

_ “Last time I died.”  _ That's what you'd said, and he'd dismissed it as the delirious ramblings of a dying girl. Yet there had been that unusual reading several days prior, and that soft echo in your soul that he’d regarded as a mere curiosity - what else has he overlooked?

“no idea, bro. why don’t you go ask ‘em?”


	4. Timeline 1d

[Timeline 1d]

 

The resounding ache in your side lingers like a phantom wound. The taste of copper is still fresh in your mouth, but when you spit on the ground the saliva comes out clean. 

Is this a fever dream? A hallucination unfolding in your mind as you bleed out in the snow?

You bite the inside of your cheek. The pain is sharp and undeniably real. You press down firmly on your miraculously intact stomach. Nothing.

So. You’re alive. 

The tall skeleton is shouting something at you, then starts striding towards you. The shorter one is watching you with narrowed eye sockets, hands shoved deep into his pockets.

“HUMAN.” The tall skeleton somehow manages to look anxious. His brow bones slope downwards in concern as he extends a gloved hand towards you. “ARE YOU FEELING ALRIGHT?”

“I - yeah. I’m ok.” He helps you to your feet and brushes the snow out of your hair, then straightens your clothes like a parent helping an unruly child. “Thanks.”

The skeleton clears his throat and says, “SEEING HOW QUICKLY YOU SOLVED THE LAST FOUR PUZZLES, I’VE DECIDED THAT THE NEXT FEW ARE FAR TOO EASY FOR YOU! SO WHY BOTHER!!” He strikes a heroic pose, his red scarf fluttering behind him like a cape. “LET’S CUT TO THE CHASE!”

“What - ”

“HUMAN! I, THE GREAT PAPYRUS, WILL BE YOUR OPPONENT - IS WHAT I WOULD SAY, IF YOU WERE IN ANY STATE TO BE CHALLENGED. JUST LOOK AT YOU! DISORIENTED AND UNDERFED! YOU’RE CLEARLY IN NEED OF A GOOD MEAL!”

“I don’t -”

“THAT IS WHY I, YOUR CORDIAL HOST, AM FORMALLY INVITING YOU TO DINNER! HUMAN! FOLLOW ME! WE CAN HAVE OUR DRAMATIC CONFRONTATION LATER!”

You desperately try to get the shorter skeleton’s attention as Papyrus speaks, but he avoids all eye contact with you. Before you’re fully aware of what’s happening, you’re being dragged through the woods and into town.

-

A steaming hot plate of spaghetti sits before you. Its meatballs are sculpted into perfect spheres. A sprig of parsley artfully tops the tomato sauce. The noodles themselves gleam almost gold under the overhead kitchen light. It’s all very picturesque, but for some reason it smells vaguely like Play-doh®. You cautiously raise a forkful to your mouth and bite down. 

If confusion had a taste, this would be it. 

“WELL? DO YOU LIKE IT?”

Oh god. Oh jesus. Papyrus’ cavernous eyesockets are full of hope. You force yourself to swallow.

“Delicious.” You force a wink, “Best I’ve ever had.”

Papyrus bursts into tears. “WILL I EVER MEET ANOTHER SPAGHETTI AFICIONADO WITH A TASTE AS REFINED AS YOURS?”

From behind him, Sans gives you a sympathetic thumbs up. Your stomach emits a loud protest, but you shovel another forkful into your mouth. You’re going to eat this entire plate if it kills you.

-

It doesn’t kill you, but it comes close. You spend the rest of the night lying in agony on the sofa, occasionally vomiting into a conveniently placed bucket. Sans pats you on the back as you come up for air.

“thanks for eating all that spaghetti to appease my brother.” he says. You dry heave in response.

**Author's Note:**

> Massive thanks to neroli9 for betaing this for me. If it weren't for her, I doubt any of this would have ever been published.  
> Check out her Sans/Reader mob au fic, A Puzzle Just for Me. It's seriously amazing.
> 
>  
> 
> If you liked this, please consider leaving a comment. If you hated it, leave a comment anyway so that I can improve in the future. Thanks!
> 
> Feel free to shoot me a message at: peonylanterns.tumblr.com


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